The Winds are Singing Freedom
by Crunch
Summary: In a world beside our own, mutants are kept as slaves... shackled and branded, traded like currency. But they're only waiting for a voice...(AU)


The Winds are Singing Freedom  
  
By: Crunch  
  
Summary: In a world beside our own, mutants are kept as slaves... shackled and branded, traded like currency. But they're only waiting for a voice...  
  
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Don't judge the story by the wit of this disclaimer, please.  
  
Everything else: Wow, this one's gonna be long when it's done. Let me know how you like the prologue, ey?  
  
......................................  
  
"I was not born to be free. I was born to adore and to obey."  
  
.......................................  
  
PROLOGUE  
  
.......................................  
  
The boy in the tunnel stooped beside his favorite grate and watched a bald white morning turn red around the edges, holding its breath, and flush into a purple afternoon. Beneath his feet, water ran- oil colored and salty, across the floors, beneath his toes, through the iron, splashing into the city outside. If he closed his eyes, it felt like beach water. Smelled like it, too. Once you got past the stink of lime and rotted metal, it really did. And the sound of it trickling out the grate, across chunks of concrete into the rut below the man-sized pipe, was calming. Like a waterfall. Really, it was.  
  
He stooped and ran his fingers through the flow, scraping the metal beneath, and scrubbing at the grime that stained his skin like India ink. His hands were rough- long fingers calloused, and palms scraped and gouged from clinging on concrete. Dirt found it's way into every corner- bits of gravel and day-old, maybe week-old blood stuck there too. His hands would never be lily white, but maybe the oil would slick some of it away.  
  
No go.  
  
He turned his mind to the world outside the grate. It was coming on evening, had been for a while. There wasn't any sun- there hadn't been all day- but the dark was coming faster, the city getting louder. He'd leave the tunnel soon. Not yet, it was still too light, even without sun, so he'd wait until the sky ran black.  
  
When he felt a tear in his fingers, the boy looked down, and realized he'd been scrubbing this whole time, and his skin was flushed with oil now, on top of everything else. He couldn't see his face in them, like he could in the water, but if he squinted he thought he saw himself shining through around the edges of his fingertips- flat, frozen blue eyes, thick wet hair, graying after seventeen years, and soap colored skin. He was still pretty, only paler than he'd remembered, the dye bleached out of him from sunless days. Except at night. At night, he looked neon. That's what Nanny said...  
  
Nanny. She would be worried, terrified he'd been taken, even though he knew his way around the shadows of the city by now. He could make his way in the daylight, and do it well. His father had seen to that, before he'd been taken. Slouching through shadows was a part of his heritage. It was in his blood... the blood on his fingers.  
  
If he'd been a little less worried about the blood, the boy might have noticed the soft but steady whir of a helicopter around the bend. He didn't.  
  
Giving up on his fingers, he stood, unfolding on long legs like a rising crane, to stare at the world. Past the cement creek below his favorite grate in the water piping, half a mile or so after the banks, where bottles and shopping carts sparkled in the reeds, skyscrapers sprouted like steel woodlands. They weren't very pretty, but they were the next best thing to trees, and he never went near the trees this time of year. It was hunting season. So the city would do him just fine, from a distance.  
  
And when the sun sank lower, he could creep through the piping, out into the creek, and if he stayed low, no one in those skyscrapers would look up from their desks, out their windows, and see him shining there. Nanny might complain about the smell, but it was worth it, for the air. Sometimes he needed air so badly, in a room with all the windows open. But he'd learned to live without it, without a lot of things. Like sunlight.  
  
And then it came.  
  
The clang of a wire tacked to a jumble of soup cans, from just over the crest of the concrete pond, wrapped among the weeds. The alarm, an fine system worked out by one of The Hidden, in their finer moments. Simple. Innocent. Completely human. His father might have admired The Hidden for it... but not him. The boy didn't need them, stashed away in the woodlands, living like savages. He had his dignity, and he had his tunnels, with his oh-so-very-beautiful city view, and he had enough sense about him to keep an ear open for helicopters at all times. He didn't need their alarms.  
  
But at that moment, as he ducked away from the grating, skittered away into the piping like a water beetle while the buzz of the copter turned to a sharp roar, and the footsteps of Hunters thundered in the background, Pietro Maximoff was very, very thankful for the alarms. Just this once.  
  
After all, it was hunting season.  
  
................................  
  
The string of cans that snaked its way around telephone poles at the edge of the woods rattled, in shuddering metallic breaths that screamed trouble in a whisper. Another string called out along the forest floor, and another at the drinking place, and still another at The Bunker. All of it triggered by one man, crouched at the edge of the trees, tugging on single strand as he watched the copter land not a mile away.  
  
Jaw clamped in concentration, the man... strike that, the boy... sank towards the dirt, sneaker-ed feet shifting restlessly on the sun-shaded soil, legs coiled and rear end resting low on his ankles, he tugged at the wire in short, sharp bursts.  
  
There were probably better ways of rigging it, he reflected. In the time before... before it had gotten dangerous just to be himself, the young man with slashes of green paste and mud beneath his eyes could've thought of something genius to warn the others. Something shiny and high tech, whirring with the brilliance stuffed inside his brain. Something far better than a tripwire tied to soup cans. But that was why it worked so beautifully. No one would suspect a line of trash wobbling into the woodlands. They'd expect flares, earthquakes, the fires of the apocalypse... something unusual. Inhuman. Not soup cans.  
  
The crunch of army boots on concrete called his mind front and center. It never should have wandered in the first place, he knew. The trouble was, his brain was screaming for exercise... not the part that cried commands at his body, sitting deadly still, waiting for a shift in air currents to trigger it, before barking 'Run! Crouch! Dive! Hide! Don't let them close! Don't let them in!' That part of his psyche had plenty of exercise.  
  
It was the second part that needed air- the part that knew the screech of chalk on a chalkboard, the thrum of a cello in a concert hall, the smell of a chemistry set from the nearest department store. He was choking for those things. Hmph. And they said he wasn't human.  
  
'I used to be', he thought, and bit his lip to keep it from shaking.  
  
But that part hadn't been let out to run since the age of... was it ten? Eleven? Eight? It was hard to count the years. It was easier to count the bounty hunters in blue storming up the hillside.  
  
Five... ten... fifteen, guns ready, flak jackets flapping in the breeze. Fanned out by the field behind the city, eating their way towards the forest, like blue rust. They were coming. He kept his eyes as close to shut as he dared- with the sun leaking fast from the sky, and night rolling in on the backs of the clouds, the Hunters, if they thought to look low enough, would be hard pressed not to spot a blazing red pair of eyes among the bush. He gave it another second, just a moment more. Three were headed up the path, he saw, no doubt about that. The rest might miss, but if he'd gotten the trajectory of those three on target... and he had. No mistake about that. His head for numbers never failed him, even when he wished it would.  
  
The young man slid backwards through the leaves, crunching across burned out pine needles and hacked-away bushes, till he was far enough back to stand without the warm prickle of a scope across his chest. Scott Summers took off at full speed, his lithe young limbs pumping and the blood stirring inside of him as he ran, a bronzed blur against the dim green landscape  
  
Back to tell the others They were coming.  
  
.............................  
  
From twenty yards away, the Summers boy could barely be picked out from the patches of sunlight that dropped between the leaves. From a half a mile away, the nearly-silent crunch of his sneakers over branches and forest debris was long gone. From another mile or so, so was the forest. Hidden by the concrete jungle- iron groves of skyscrapers, blacktop streets snaking over hills and under back alleys, like pitch-filled rivers, and brick walls that hung like red ivy from the sky, fencing in the Trading Grounds of Westchester, New York, where the boy in chains, just coming awake, realized he was fucked.  
  
Fucked.  
  
Thoroughly, completely, royally screwed, he ruminated as he cast a glance towards the cracked metal ceiling of the cage, from which his hands dangled lifelessly by twin iron chains. Below eyelevel, his bare feet shifted restlessly on a cold steel floor, littered with piercing, biting woodchips and sugar-like sprinklings of sawdust that did nothing for his comfort level. Added to that a mind numbing, violently red ache in the base of his skull, rippling outwards in waves from a baton-shaped bruise that made his head feel like a badly cracked egg, and he was in a bad way.  
  
The boy flicked snarls of thick brown hair from half-closed eyes as gently as he could, sighed and gave a feeble tug on his bonds, to no avail. He had to stop when the velvety black splinters of pain overtook him, threatening to send him off to oblivion once more. He sighed again.  
  
Some days it just didn't pay to regain consciousness.  
  
When the red veils of pain had subsided, the boy in chains chanced a dazed look at his cage... no, not his cage. A cage, that would've held any mutie stupid enough to have gotten himself captured, if it hadn't held him. A ten pace by ten pace box, with bare steel walls, cold and blunt, a lime green painter's bucket of stale water in the corner, which he couldn't get at anyhow, and a bald and aging fluorescent bar for a head-splittingly bright light source. A rectangle of jet black glass glittered across from him, the only break in the metal box, and probably six inches thick at that. A mirror? No, he realized with a start, and a stirring of acid in his belly. A window. Only from the outside, of course. A window for the customers, not for the goods.  
  
Come to think of it, he had a pretty good idea just exactly what was happening here. He'd heard stories of the Trading Grounds, horror tales told by worried parents as they tucked their children into bed inside their hidey-holes. A plot of land like a fairgrounds, in the thick of the city, hidden behind twenty-foot walls, where rows and rows of boxes, all metal, all cages, stretched between the aisles, like the worlds largest peep show. The mutant grounds of Westchester weren't the only in the world, of course, but they were the best in the territory of New York.  
  
New York; a crumbling empire that had realized the lights were flickering on its stage in the world, and had turned to mutant trade as a means of business, edging out an aging stock market.  
  
That was what the stories said, anyhow. St. John Allerdyce only wished he'd paid more attention.  
  
Though the boy in the cage had no way of knowing, night was falling rapidly outside his box, sweeping across Westchester, out of the city and through the forests, where Scott Summers and the rest of the Hidden tucked themselves away to live like savages, and over the tunnels, where Pietro Maximoff ran like mad to be back before the night. The dark drove forwards, its mouth wide open, while all over, the Hunters crept closer on its tail. Before the sun rose and fell again, all three would be in chains.  
  
And it was all the fault of the boy in the tunnel.  
  
............................  
  
Review please? I want to know if anyone's got any interest in the story at all. And I promise, it'll get smoother. And hopefully more grammatically correct. (And ignore the annoying and multiple periods, will you? I can't seem to get the sections to break themselves up with style.)  



End file.
